Tanel gave a talk at the annual conference of the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences „Green Transition and Smart Solutions: Science for a Sustainable Future“, which took place on November 28th, 2025 in Oecologicum.

He explained the suitability and importance of natural experiments and introduced several studies he has conducted in the past years. Agroecosystems are a dominant land use and strong driver of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. This makes them perfect for natural experiments with high replicability. This makes them suitable for testing theories and ecosystem aspects we are interested in.

He also introduced just published study results on how intensive management leads to lower AMF richness and biomass, loss of specialists and more culturable generalists. Their experiments showed that community is functionally homogenized – biomass and diversity decline together. These results were just published in New Phytologist.